But since I’m partisan on the topic, I refer you to Jason Kottke. His January 12 post, “Digg vs. Slashdot (or, traffic vs. influence),” provides an interesting case study on the difference between reach and importance. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s what I came away with:

–Alexa stats show Digg gaining on Slashdot in terms of reach (Alexa combines pageviews and unique visitors), but Slashdot still has nearly twice (1.8x) the reach of Digg

–Both sites have enormous power to move traffic around the web. When Digg posted a link to Kottke’s site for 3 hours (between 11pm Saturday & 2am Sunday, not exactly prime time), they sent 20,000 people to Kottke. When Slashdot picked up the same link (Sunday afternoon) and posted it for 24 hours, it drove over 84,000 visitors to Kottke.

–Influence, ie, the ability to light the match on the forest-fire that spreads across the web, isn’t the same thing as direct audience to one’s site. “I’m pretty sure that the person who submitted this link to Slashdot got it from Digg or at least from a site that got it from Digg. Bottom line: if the iPod thing, which is several months old, hadn’t been Dugg, it would not have appeared on Slashdot the next day.”

New Balance product placement in VOD Exercise TV programs won’t ruffle any feathers — it’s a perfect match. But product placement alone won’t pick up all of the ad-revenue slack created by commercial skipping. Nor does it offer much for the marketer that doesn’t have several million dollars to throw at each media partner. From today’s NY Times.

Unilever joins P&G, SC Johnson and 3 other companies in a test of Project Apollo, Arbitron and VNU Nielsen’s joint venture to track media consumption beyond TV watching (AdAge). Together these marketers will spend $6.2 billion in measured media spending this year. The relatively small Apollo research panel, though, limits the brands who can learn from this pilot to those with enormous marketing budgets:

“Because impact from any given ad or marketing vehicle tends to be relatively small, a 6,250-member panel may provide data useable only for the biggest brands used by a substantial portion of U.S. consumers, said Mike Hess, director-global research and consumer insights, of Omnicom Groupâ€™s OMD.”

“The simple fact that the wine [being advertised] was out there and was being blogged about became part of the story telling sales process. As the sales force went out to supermarket buyers and importers, there was a new, different and exciting story to tell. Additionally, a retail outlet is far more likely to take on an increased inventory if it knows the product is getting talked about. The mindset is that if they’re talking, they’re more likely to buy.”

I couldn’t agree more with Steve’s description of blog marketing done right:

“A big budget brand campaign is a briefly-worded, single-messaged megaphone approach. Not much can be forced through that megaphone and what is forced through is often misinterpreted. A blogging campaign throws the megaphone on the floor and picks up the martini glass creating a cocktail party at which people talk to people normally in a language unencumbered by pointless brand blather.”

Check out the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to see which big companies are active bloggers. Coming soon: Stock-price tracking to see if there’s a correlation between an openness to frank, accessible dialog about your brand and the financial performance of your company.

Jeff Jarvis provides a succinct explanation of the role tags will play in the next generation of internet applications (BuzzMachine):

“The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools — pencils, presses and Dewey decimals — thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself.”